Stebbins, Lucy Poate, 1886-1958

The daughter of Baptist missionaries in Japan, author Lucy (Poate) Stebbins was the third of five children of Belle (Marsh) and Thomas Pratt Poate. She was born in Portsmouth, England, while her parents were on furlough, but returned with them to Japan before she was two. The family settled in western New York State in 1892. Stebbins was graduated from the Fredonia Normal School in 1904. She taught school in Sherman and Mt. Vernon, N.Y. until her marriage in 1910 to Howard Leslie Stebbins. In 1919 Howard Stebbins was named librarian of the Social Law Library in Boston. The family, which now included three children (Richard, Elizabeth, and Marabelle) moved to Newton, Mass., where they resided until 1943, when they moved to Cambridge. Preoccupied with her domestic work, LPS did not begin writing until the 1920s, publishing Old Adam's Likeness, the first of eight novels, in 1928. Her biographical and critical works include A Victorian Album: Some Lady Novelists of the Period (1946) and London Ladies: True Tales of the Eighteenth Century (1952), and three books written with her son, Richard Poate Stebbins: Enchanted Wanderer: The Life of Carl Maria von Weber (1940), Frank Damrosch: Let the People Sing (1945), and The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family (1945). She died in Boston in 1958. A full account of her life can be found in So Hard the Stones: Lucy Poate Stebbins and Her Life in Literature (1993) by Richard Poate Stebbins.